Karl Rove's Early Machinations

April 18, 2006
by Molly Ivins
TruthDig

An interesting semi-historical footnote concerning Dick Cheney’s oft-reiterated references during the 2000 presidential campaign to President Clinton’s weaseling under oath. “He knows what the meaning of ‘is’ is,” says Cheney in his campaign stump speech to show the moral superiority of the Republican camp.

Which leads us to this story about Karl Rove, Bush’s campaign manager and the man they call “Bush’s brain.”

Rove, as all the world knows, has been a longtime Republican political operative in Texas prior to heading to Washington with Bush. During that time, Texas Democrats noticed a pattern that they eventually became somewhat paranoid about: In election years, there always seemed to be an FBI investigation of some sitting Democrat either announced or leaked to the press.

After the election was over, the allegations often vanished, although in the case of Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower, three of his aides were later convicted. The investigations were conducted by FBI agent Greg Rampton, who was stationed in Austin in those years.

In 1989, Rove was nominated for a position with the federal Board for International Broadcasting. He answered a questionnaire from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that was later obtained by subpoena. One of the questions was: Have you been interviewed or asked to supply any information in connection with any administrative or grand jury investigation in the past 18 months? If so, provide details.

Rove responded, “This summer I met with agent Greg Rampton of the Austin FBI office at his request regarding a probe of political corruption in the office of Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower.”

In 1991, Rove was undergoing state Senate confirmation hearings for an appointment to the East Texas State University board of regents. Sen. Bob Glasgow was questioning Rove about his work for Gov. Bill Clements in the 1986 campaign against Gov. Mark White.

A now-forgotten incident of that campaign involved a listening device allegedly found in Rove’s office by a private security firm a few days before a televised debate. The case made headlines around the state. It was investigated by Rampton, who never found the alleged perpetrator.

Glasgow: “Ah, Mr. Rove, would you now tell us publicly who bugged your office that you blamed upon Mark White publicly and the press statewide?”

Rove: “Ah, first of all, I did not blame it on Mark White. If, ah, if you’ll recall I specifically said at the time that we disclosed the bugging that we did not know who did it, but we knew who might benefit from it. And no, I do not know. ...”

Glasgow: “And are you now satisfied that Mark White and the Democratic Party did not bug your office as you—as you released, ah, to the newspapers?”

Rove: “Senator, I never said Mark White bugged my office, I’m not certain he has an electronic background. I never said the Democratic Party bugged it either. ... As to who bugged it, Senator, I do not know—and the FBI does not know. ...”

Glasgow: “How long have you known an FBI agent by the name of Greg (Rampton)?”

Rove: “Ah, Senator, it depends—would you define ‘know’ for me?”

Glasgow: “What is your relationship with him?”

Rove: “Ah, I know, I would not recognize Greg (Rampton) if he walked in the door. We have talked on the phone a var-—a number of times. Ah, and he has visited in my office once or twice, but we do not have a social or personal relationship whatsoever. ...”

Glasgow: “During the Rick Perry campaign (against Jim Hightower), did you have any conversations with FBI agent Rampton about the course and conduct of that campaign?”

Rove: “Yes, I did, two or three times. ...”

Glasgow: “Did you issue a press release in Washington, at a fund-raiser, about information you’d received from the FBI implicating—implicating, ah, Hightower?”

Rove: “We did not issue a press release. ... We did not issue a news release. I talked to a member of the press ...”

Glasgow: “I’m gonna let you expound on anything you want to. Ah, involved in campaigns that you’ve been involved in, do you know why agent Rampton conducted a criminal investigation of Garry Mauro at the time you were involved in that campaign, pulled the finance records of Bob Bullock at the time you were involved in that campaign, pulled the campaign records of Jim Hightower at the time you were involved in that campaign?”

Rove: “Well, Senator, first of all, as I said before, I was not involved in either Bob Bullock or Garry Mauro’s campaigns or the campaigns of their Republican opponent. I’d be hard pressed to tell you who Garry Mauro’s opponent was in 1986. Ah, and I’d—think I’d be hard pressed even to remember who Bob Bullock’s opponent was in 1986. So I can’t answer that part of the question. I do know that I became involved in Rick Perry’s campaign in November of 1989. At that point there was already an investigation ongoing of the Texas Department of Agriculture, prompted by stories which had appeared in August and September, I believe, in The Dallas Morning News regarding the use of Texas Department of Agriculture funds.”

Glasgow shifts to the Board for International Broadcasting appointment: “And in answering a question for that perspective (sic) federal appointment, did you make a claim in there that you were involved in the Hightower investigation at the request of special agent Rampton of the Federal Bureau of Investigation?”

Rove: “No, sir.”

Glasgow: “You did not make that statement in response ...”

Rove: “I did not, and I was ...”

Glasgow: “Let me finish my question. Did you make that statement in response to a written questionnaire?”

Rove: “Ah, Senator, ah, no, I did not make that statement, but I ...”

Glasgow: “Thank you very much.”

Rampton, who was subsequently involved with the FBI operation at Ruby Ridge, said that he had not talked to Rove about the Hightower case. Told that Rove had so claimed in his federal questionnaire, Rampton said:

“Let me think. I couldn’t recall talking to him on that particular case at all. My memory, if there was a conversation we had on that case, well, I can’t recall it. He was not an integral part of that case. I don’t even remember bouncing anything off him as somebody who was familiar with politics in Austin.”

Molly Ivins's latest book is “Who Let the Dogs In?”

Karl Rove: The éminence grise of the White House

Rove, Karl C. b. December 25, 1950, in Denver Colorado, manages the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Public Liaison, and the Office of Strategic Initiatives at the White House. Rove attended the University of Utah, the University of Texas at Austin and George Mason University. No academic degree. He has taught at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and in the Journalism Department at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1980 he married Valerie Wainright, a wealthy Houston woman from the Bush social circle. Was divorced and married his second wife, Darby, in 1986. They have a son, 17. He resides at 4925 Weaver Terrace, NW, Washington, DC 20016. White House email address: karlrove@NCR.disa.mil

From his official biography

Born on Christmas Day 1950 in Denver, Colorado, as one of five siblings, Karl C. Rove grew up in both Colorado and Utah, where his father was employed as a geologist. On his 19th birthday, his father abandoned the family and soon afterwards, Rove found out that this man was not his biological father. He was informed of this by his family. His mother committed suicide in Reno, Nevada in 1980.

While in a Utah high school, Rove was seen as an intelligent but loud-mouthed, highly opinionated eccentric and was not popular with his peers. School records indicate that Rove was highly argumentative with both his teachers and his peers and was known to use “vulgar and suggestive” language to  female students.  He had no girlfriends but spent all of his time in obsessive pursuit of various political offices in the school . It was remarked by students and faculty sponsors alike that Rove was intensely fixated on political activities “to the point of obsession” and that his methods of seeking school offices were highlighted by “unprincipled campaigns, noteworthy by their viciousness” towards any rival. Rove always wore jackets and ties in school and displayed an attitude of pompous self-importance that made him even more unpopular with staff and students alike. He had no interest in women, student social or sporting events but dedicated all of his school time in political activity. It was noted that when he obtained a position, he apparently lost all interest in it and merely applied himself to gaining the next higher position.

Rove had very little pocket money and was accused several times of stealing money from student’s personal lockers. His family had no strong political affiliations but Karl became fixated on Richard Nixon before he was ten and was a very loud and persistent supporter of him.

Like George W. Bush Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, Rove managed to avoid the Vietnam draft with a college deferment, but dropped out of the University of Utah in 1971, never obtaining a degree. While at the University of Utah, Rove began his real-life  political career as the executive director of the College Republican National Committee. He held this position until 1972 when he became the National Chairman of the College Republicans (1973-1974). As chairman, Rove had access to many powerful politicians and government officials during the Watergate scandal, including then CIA director George H. W. Bush. For the next few years, he worked in various Republican circles and assisted George H. W. Bush's 1980 presidential campaign. Rove's greatest claim to fame at the time was that he had introduced Bush to Lee Atwater. A signature tactic of Rove was to attack an opponent on the opponent's strongest issue. Another tactic used since high school, was to launch smear campaigns against any political rival no matter how insignificant. Rove early on was a master at slander, usually imputing sexual deviations to his opponents but always being careful to divorce himself from the resulting reactions. Reports in his school files indicate that he was repeatedly warned by school authorities about these allegations of sexual deviancy but Rove always very smugly denied being their author. A school district psychiatrist wrote that Rove was sexually inadequate and had developed an “almost pathological hatred” of so-called “normal” students. The general consensus of Karl Rove in high school is that he was very bright but obsessive about gaining some kind of control over his fellow students and doing so by publicly humiliating them. Rove was termed “arrogant, untruthful and very destructive” in his interpersonal reactions while in school.

When Rove went on to college, he only increased his intense focus on almost any kind of politics but now manifested an intense attraction to ultra-conservative politics while studying at the University of Utah, where he described himself as a "diehard Nixonite" often expressing violent hatred for what he termed "all those Commies" in Vietnam. He also expressed fury and contempt for fellow students who did not support the war and began circulating forged newspaper articles claiming criminal arrests for sexual deviancy on the part of campus liberals. Rove was a "Young Republican" back when being a Young Republican wasn't cool (a historical era ranging from 1959 through the present). As a student at the prestigious University of Utah, Rove teamed up with a young Lee Atwater to seize control of the College Republicans political club in the early 1970s.

Lee Atwater was later to become notorious as the man who sealed Michael Dukakis's defeat in the 1988 presidential election with a blatantly racist television advert demonizing the Democratic candidate for offering a weekend prison release to a violent black prisoner in Massachusetts. Atwater and Rove became lifelong friends as well as colleagues, sharing a very similar outlook including a passion for Machiavelli's The Prince, the ultimate political document about the ends justifying the means. In his campaign to seize the nationwide College Republicans by running for the chairmanship in 1973, Rove quickly reverted to type and left a mass of destruction behind him as he elbowed, kicked, bit and otherwise damaged any person standing in his way. His hallmark then, as now, was the launching of vicious and almost always invented, slander against his perceived enemies.  Prime among these accusations were allegation of sexual aberrations, a subject that Rove has always been obsessed with. In the College Republican race, Rove challenged the legitimacy of every delegate who voted for his opponent, and came up with an entirely bogus alternate slate of delegates he claimed had greater standing. The matter was ultimately decided in Rove's favor by the then head of the Republican National Committee, George H. W. Bush. Both men have remained unwaveringly loyal to each other since although the senior Bush has been careful not to identify himself with Rove’s savage malice.

His highly aggressive and completely unprincipled ad homonym attacks on anyone in his way won the 22-year-old Rove a walk-on role in the Watergate saga that was consuming the nation. A report was published in the Washington Post on August 10, 1973, titled "[Republican party] Probes Official as Teacher of Tricks", gave an account, based on tape recordings, of how Rove and a colleague had been touring the country giving young Republicans political combat training, in which they recalled their feats of Republic partisanship , such as Rove's Chicago theft at the Dixon headquarters. In the autumn election season of 1970, a chubby, simpering and  bespectacled teenager turned up at the Chicago campaign headquarters of Alan Dixon, a Democrat running for state treasurer in Illinois. No one paid the newcomer much attention when he arrived, or when he left soon afterwards. Nor did anyone in the office make the connection between the mystery volunteer and 1,000 invitations on campaign stationery that began circulating in Chicago's red-light district and soup kitchens, promising "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing" for all-comers at Dixon's headquarters.

The incident marked the genesis of the Rove-Bush axis and it was in Washington that Rove met the younger Bush. He literally fell in love with the future President’s son. "Huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma - you know, wow," Rove recalled years later. In 1977, Rove was sent to Texas, in theory to run a political action committee, but according to one Texan political consultant who knew him at the time, "It was really to baby-sit Bush back when Bush was drinking". The younger Bush, as is well known, was a heavy binge drinker and while intoxicated, was known to be completely self-destructive, cursing family friends, urinating in public, once, even in the White House during the Reagan administration.  Bush’s college records, as well as law enforcement reports, indicate that Bush’s drinking caused several minor accidents and that when apprehended he cursed and threatened police officers, claiming that his father would “get them” if they didn’t let him go. There was also the question of sexual orientation. Bush was known to associate with openly gay students and is known to have developed an “especially intimate” relationship with one student while at the Harvard Business School.

While trying to keep George W. Bush out of trouble, Rove set up a direct mail political operation, calling it Rove & Company. Its purpose was to identify potential Republican voters and target them with pro-Republican campaign literature and voter registration forms.

Rove’s direct-mail political consulting business and worked on Republican campaigns in Texas. He tapped into oil money and other corporate interests and helped a succession of candidates to clean out the old Democratic order in the South. One campaign, for a spot on the Alabama state supreme court, was so nasty it led to a year-long court battle in which Rove accused his opponent - who had led in the initial vote tally - of systematic vote fraud and thereby prevented a batch of all-important absentee ballots from being counted at all. This same underhanded tactic was repeated again in Florida in the 200 presidential election, an election controlled with an iron hand by Karl Rove and run according to his dictum of always attacking the other side by every means available including slander, fraud , intimidation and outright blackmail

They talked about a run for Texas governor in 1990, but decided to wait until the senior Bush was no longer President. .In 1994, Rove persuaded Bush to run for Governor of Texas. They waited until George H./W. Bush was not longer in office because the senior Bush disliked and disapproved of Rove’s vicious personal attacks on his opponents. It was Rove who decided to oppose a very popular incumbent, Ann Richards, and Rove developed a political strategy based on appalling venom, often accusing Richards of being a practicing Lesbian, which she was not.

Every day for two years, the Bush campaign put out negative stories about Governor Richards, hinting she was soft on crime and overly fond of homosexuals, culminating in a devastating revelation that a prominent Richards appointee had lied about her college education. From the start, Rove kept Bush away from unscripted situations, offering him just three or four key talking points which the candidate repeated ad nauseam until the electorate not only memorized them but also started to believe them. Rove also became adept at handling the media, rigorously controlling their access and never shying away from calling a dissenting reporter at home and screaming.

Although  Rove is conventionally religious, he does not share Bush's religiosity, but the two men have a similar antipathy to East Coast intellectual types and a preference for political discourse that is simple, forceful and appealing to the gut more than the head. One of Rove's favorite books is The Dream and the Nightmare, an excoriation of the progressive values of the 1960s by a neoconservative thinker called Myron Magnet. Magnet blames poverty on liberal permissiveness and suggests the problem is best left to Christian charities - an embryonic form of what Rove and Bush would come to call "compassionate conservatism". Rove is a master coiner of such political labels. "Compassionate conservatism" manages to appeal both to the religious right and also to some moderates.

In March 2001, Rove met with executives from Intel, successfully advocating a merger between a Dutch company and an Intel company supplier. Rove owned $100,000 in Intel Co. stock at the time. In June 2001, Rove met with two pharmaceutical industry lobbyists. At the time, Rove held almost $250,000 in drug industry stocks. On 30 June 2001, Rove divested his stocks in 23 companies, which included more than $100,000 in each Enron, Boeing, General Electric, and Pfizer. Rove was one of the biggest holders of Enron stock among White House staffers, with between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of shares when he was appointed. He was required to sell them when the Bush administration took office On 30 June 2001, the White House admitted that Rove was involved in administration energy policy meetings, while at the same time holding stock in energy companies including Enron. Rove also recommended the Republican strategist Ralph Reed (former executive director of the Christian Coalition) to Enron for a consulting contract as Bush was considering whether to run for president.

Although it has become a common belief that the U.S. attack on Iraq was instigated by the extreme right of the Republican party or the macninations of the very pro-Israeli neo-cons, the actual movitating force behind what has deveoped into a terrible debacle was Karl Rove. He believes, and has stated, that a wartime president is impossible to attack and that if Bush were seen as a wartime president, he would be guaranateed  two full terms. In spite of many negative reports on the feasibility of such an attack by US intelligence agencies, to include the CIA and the Pentagon, Rove easily persuaded Bush to abandon his military activities in Afghanistan for a much more dramatic pounce on oil-rich Iraq.

A former U.S. Ambassador , Joseph Wilson was one of the biggest political liabilities the White House faced in 2003. Wilson had been dispatched to Niger early in 2002 to investigate whether Iraq was trying to buy uranium there. Turns out, they weren't. He reported this information to the White House, which promptly ignored it. Bush cited the uranium story in his 2003 State of the Union address, Cheney cited it repeatedly, and the State Department cited it in several of its endless justifications for why the U.S. just had to invade Iraq. When Wilson wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times, he incurred the spiteful fury of Karl Rove and shortly after this article was publish, with attendant negativity for the President, a leak to a right wing White House friendly reporter disclosed that Wilson’s wife was a serving CIA agent. As this is a clear violation of federal law, a desultory investigation was launched but without result. Many individuals attached to the White House have put the blame for this squarely on Rove, who denies it. It is a hallmark of his destructive activities that he always hides behind others and piously claims to be the injured party.

Then, just a few short weeks after the fall of Baghdad, Rove had the President dress up in a flight suit and land on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln beneath the slogan "Mission Accomplished", in what appeared to be a brazen photo op for the presidential re-election campaign. Hindsight and the mounting body count have taught us that this was a rare Rove play gone wrong. But it also speaks volumes about the cynicism of an operation willing to create political sales pitches out of the very gravest issues of war and peace, life and death.

By his own account, Rove's sights are set even further into the future than Bush's re-election. He has spoken about strategic shifts of power that happen every so often in American history. The precedent he often refers to was set over a century ago by William McKinley, another Republican with brilliant advisers, who narrowly defeated a populist Democrat (William Jennings Bryan) in 1896 and established a Republican hegemony that lasted more than three decades.

Rove has stated in closed Republican circles that it is his aim to reduce the Democratic Party to a virtual cipher and that he intends to oversee a Republican lock on all three branches of government.

The Republicans now control the Presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. Rove's task now is to consolidate that dominance of the White House and Capitol Hill and then use it to recast the Washington's third source of power, the Supreme Court, from its current cautious conservatism to a more activist and strongly right wing Republicanism. As the Republican party has virtually been preempted by both the radical political and even more radical Christian, right, Rove caters heavily to these groups. Their ferocity appeals to his own and their tight organization make it far easier for Rove to control and direct.

Rove latest casualty in Bush purge

April 21, 2006
by Geoff Elliott, Washington correspondent
The Australian

The shake-up in George W. Bush's White House is gathering momentum, with two high-profile personnel changes and more expected in the weeks and months ahead.

Karl Rove, the US President's political architect dubbed "Bush's Brain", has been stripped of a role developing policy to instead focus solely on his other role of political strategy, as Mr Bush tries to rescue his presidency.

And Mr Bush's loyal press secretary, Scott McClellan, has resigned, in another implicit acknowledgment from the White House team that the administration needs to get back on track to avoid a potential electoral sideswipe in November.

The congressional mid-term elections will be held in just under seven months and nervous Republicans have been privately urging changes at the White House as Mr Bush's approval ratings lag in the mid-30s, a record low for his presidency.

Recent polls have indicated that Americans rate the job Republicans are doing in Congress at similar levels.

More changes are afoot, with speculation centring on a cabinet shake-up expected to dump Secretary John Snow. One of Mr Bush's closest advisers, Dan Bartlett, indicated that the White House was in transition.

"Every person who works here, particularly in the White House, knows (that) when we walk through that gate right down from here, we do so as a privilege and at the request of the President," he told US television.

"That can change any day. We know that. Members of the cabinet know that. And we serve each day like it may be our last day and, if more change is necessary, changes will be made."

But some have described the makeover so far as more nip-and-tuck than facelift, since there are no signs that Mr Bush is in the mood to change the top personnel who have been key players in the Iraq War policy that has come to define and hobble his presidency - namely Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The changes announced so far were sparked by the resignation last month of Mr Bush's chief of staff Andy Card, after five years on the job. He was replaced by another White House insider, Josh Bolten.

On his first official day on the job on Monday, Mr Bolten told senior White House staff that if any of them were considering going, now would be a good time so a new team could be in place well ahead of the November elections.

Mr McClellan, who has been something of a punching bag for the media in the past six months in the daily White House press briefings and who was considered by some Republican insiders to be much too defensive, decided to fall on his sword.

Mr Rove remains close to Mr Bush, but the decision to strip him of a role in policy-making is an acknowledgment that his undoubted political skills will be needed at their fullest to help steer the party through to the November polls.

However it also comes amid an investigation into Mr Rove's role in the leaking of the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose husband Joseph Wilson had been critical of the Bush administration's use of intelligence to build the case for war in Iraq.

Democrats seized on Mr Rove's "demotion". Party chairman Howard Dean said Mr Rove has a hand in "nearly every scandal that has consumed the Bush White House".

"But a demotion is not enough," he said. "From the collapse of the President's scheme to privatise social security (America's pension system) to Rove's involvement in the outing of a covert CIA agent's identity while he still holds a security clearance, the President has abundant reason to fire Karl Rove.

"The Bush White House is merely engaging in window dressing."

Mr Rove will remain as one of three deputies to Mr Bolten.

His policy role, acquired after guiding Mr Bush's 2004 re-election, will be taken over by Joel Kaplan, the former deputy to Mr Bolten in his previous role as budget chief in the White House.